Lately I’ve been thinking of that episode of “Ozark” in which Marty, Jason Bateman’s master money launderer of a character, is locked in a Mexican drug lord’s cellar and tortured with piped-in death metal, loud and unrelenting.
Lately I’ve been thinking of the F.B.I.’s attempt to flush the Branch Davidians out of their Waco, Texas, compound by blaring Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking” over and over again over loudspeakers.
I’ve been thinking these things lately because I’ve been listening to commercial radio.
What gives the lie to the entire enterprise is any trip I make to the city, when, at some point west of that demarcation of cultural and geographical significance, the hard-boiled Shirley-Mastic area, the car radio dial is spun to what is not a commercial station, 90.7 FM, WFUV out of Fordham, God bless it, “the Jesuit University of New York.”
What follows is a comment that fully deserves a “You’re just realizing this now?” response, but the novelty of hearing “Panic” by the Smiths, with Morrissey’s golden voice triumphantly lambasting the awfulness of mass-market radio — “Hang the blessed D.J. / because the music that they constantly play / it says nothing to me about my life” — well, it’s like Emily Dickinson said in that letter, “as if the top of my head were taken off.”
And the chorus of children chants, “Hang the D.J., hang the D.J., hang the D.J.” What fun.
That’s from 1987 — a retrospective view, for sure. And let me stay there for a moment, because that’s about when I remember walking down Commonwealth Avenue as a Boston U. newbie with my friend Allyson. She was from a Greek family in Providence, R.I., she wrote poetry, she had rejected her Harvard acceptance because of perceived snobbery, and she put her Walkman’s headphones over my ears to introduce me to a band out of Milwaukee she thought I’d like, the Violent Femmes.
She was right. And to this day that band’s angsty lyrics and thundering stand-up bass are used as something different to change up the radio playlists. It’s almost as if innovation stopped around, speaking of Boston, the 1988 release of the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” which still sounds fresh, the explosive drums, the witty storytelling, the inexplicable roominess of those loose-limbed songs.
Thus endeth the lament. On a positive note, after years of telling myself I would, just tonight as I write this I’ve at last started streaming WFUV online. No need to hang the D.J.